Exploring the Mysterious Alphabet of Sperm Whales

upstart writes:

Researchers reveal complex communication patterns in sperm whales:

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville's formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.

Now, thanks to machine learning, we're a little closer to understanding these gentle giants. Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) recently used algorithms to decode the "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," revealing sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species.

In a new open-access study published in Nature Communications, the research shows that sperm whales codas, or short bursts of clicks that they use to communicate, vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, revealing a communication system far more intricate than previously understood.

[...] The researchers identified something of a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," where various elements that researchers call "rhythm," "tempo," "rubato," and "ornamentation" interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls - rubato - or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations.

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